WPEngine Review — The Best Customer Experience You Can Find, Period.

We are living in a fast pacing world. In this agile environment, when you face a problem, you also develop a quick and reliable solution. Not only the web developers but, any professional can relate to this kind of situation.

Fortunately, for WordPress developers, there has come a time where managed WordPress hosting companies are working very hard to give their best to their customers. These companies compete on the level of quality and value they provide to their clients.

Meaning their customer support teams are continually working around the clock to answer every technical and non-technical query that their customer has for them. Within the list of all of these companies, you can find the name of WPEngine — A Managed WordPress Hosting Company — at the top.

WPEngine is one of the most beloved managed WordPress hosting company in the WordPress community. Today, I am very excited to shed a little light on all the right reasons responsible for this in the first place and the kind of users who can use this excellent hosting company to host their websites.

WPEngine is a Managed WordPress Hosting company which specializes in managed hosting, customization, intelligence, and integrated solutions for WordPress websites. Jason Cohan founded WPEngine in 2010 when the concept of managed WordPress hosting was still fresh.

Since 2010, the company has grown to a whopping 480+ employees which includes a lot of prominent names like Heather J. Brunner — CEO & Chairperson WPEngine, Jason Cohan — CTO WPEngine, and David Vogelpohl — Vice President of Web Strategy WPEngine.

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In 2018, WPEngine raised$250 million in funding from Silver Lake. It now serves more than 75,000 customers with more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Recently, they also acquired StudioPress — the company behind Genesis Framework and a little over 60 professionally developed WordPress themes — in June 2018.

All the Right Reasons for Choosing WPEngine

Deciding a host for your website is utterly essential. It is because you always want to have a group of people who will take care of your websites and help you whenever you’re in trouble. Here’s the list of all the right reasons for choosing WPEngine to host your WordPress sites.

🏅 Award-Winning Customer Support

WPEngine provides award-winning customer support to their customers. Their customer support won their third Stevie Award this year, in February, for excellence in customer service. WPEngine has a massive support team which consists of actual WordPress experts which help you resolve your queries.

In 2017 alone, their support staff answered a little over 678,000 support questions. WPEngine also invests thousands of hours in the training of this team. Their support team completed 4,640 hours of training last year.

Another critical factor which contributes to the success of their support team is availability. WPEngine’s support staff is available 24/7/365 answering questions of their clients like any excellent hosting company out there. You can open a chat with their support at any time of the day.

🤝 Values of WPEngine

WPEngine is built on a set of core values which set this company apart from any other managed WordPress company. These values help the employees of this company to make the right decisions, become an aspiration for the future growth of the company and set the root for their team culture.

Some of these values are:

👊 Built to last.

✅ Do the right thing.

🙌 Customer-inspired.

🌟 Where the best get better.

🚀 Aspiring to lead, committed to giving feedback.

🛡 Security and Reliability

When people trust a hosting company with their websites, they are expecting a reliable host with impenetrable security. WPEngine offers various security protocols which makes it one of the most secure hosting companies in the WordPress ecosystem.

Some of their noteworthy security protocols go as follows:

🚫 Threat Detection and Blocking

Almost 5% of the online world visits the company’s network every day which makes it more susceptible to attacks. The system blocks more than 2 million attacks every day with its threat detection and blocking rules for the internet traffic.

The traffic goes through an inspection of the WPEngine’s network which detects attacks based on pattern, locations, or suspicious activity. If the system finds anything wrong with the traffic, then it automatically blocks the source to prevent further attacks in the future.

🚔 Proactive Security Maintenance

The development team is also on the lookout for security issues which may arise on the level of web application — WordPress — or the server level. If the threat level they find is dangerous, they patch the application temporarily until the fix is released or they report their findings to the WordPress community.

✅ Managed Patching and Updates

As soon as WordPress Foundation releases security updates, the maintenance teams at WPEngine automatically upgrade their customers’ websites ASAP. It is done to ensure the safety of these sites so that they do not remain vulnerable to known attacks of any kind.

⚖ Scalability

WPEngine’s platform is scalable which means that in case you face any surprises in your daily routine traffic, you will be able to scale the resources of your WordPress site. This option comes in handy during the sales season for WooCommerce websites.

🚀 Managed WordPress Hosting

Maintaining a WordPress website nowadays is a difficult task. You have to stay on top of all the updates related to piece of software being used on your site. It can take a lot of your time and energy which is a total waste if you’re not using it to take care of your business.

Managed WordPress Hosting takes care of all these trivial tasks related to website maintenance. It in-turn lets you take care of your business and invest your time and energy in the building and growth of your digital experience for your customers.

📈 Performance and Optimization

If your website is taking ample time to load, then there is a chance that you could be losing your customers. You can lose almost 87% of your visitors with a two-second delay in page load time. WPEngine provides you with the necessary tools which make sure that this never happens to your WordPress website.

WPEngine developed three products in 2017 to help customers optimize their sites and its content. The name of these products are:

🏎 Application Performance

Application Performance is powered by New Relic to make your WordPress site perform faster. It provides you with code-level insights to help fix the performance issues faster and optimize your website proactively before your visitors face any problem.

⏰ Page Performance

This tool enables you to gain actionable insights so that you can improve your site performance. It also helps you visualize the speed and performance data of your WordPress site. In this way, you can measure the improvement in performance over time.

🗂 Content Performance

Using Google Analytics with your website can do wonders regarding growing your traffic. Content Performance is an application which utilizes Google Analytics optimized explicitly for your WordPress site and helps you build your audience as a result.

WPEngine announced a solution center in September last year. Like WordPress’ plugins repository, this solution center is a place for third-party plugins, software, and services which can help you improve the performance of your WordPress website. There are various categories of solutions present in this center.

All of these themes from StudioPress are designed professionally, mobile ready, optimized for SEO and has different layouts to suit the needs of your website. These products are available for download under the tab of Themes on the User Portalof WPEngine.

🎬 Different Website Environments

Another benefit of using WPEngine is that you get different environments — Development, Staging, and Production — for different phases of your website. These are essential for testing and deployment before a site becomes available to the public.

These environments are also easy to operate. You can copy the contents of a website to/from any of these environments from/to another one with the help of a single button. You can find these buttons on the details page of a single WordPress install.

♻️ Free Site Migrations

WPEngine offers free website migrations to all of its customers. It has developed a free automated site migration plugin — WP Engine Automated Migration — for the sole purpose of this task. This plugin makes the WordPress website migration from any other hosting to WPEngine a breeze.

You can contact the support anytime — 24/7/365 — to request your site migration. The support team will get in touch ASAP to get the details of your website and then you can enjoy a cup of coffee ☕️ while they migrate the site to WPEngine for you.

🏠 Type of Usage

Depending on the cost of plans by WPEngine, there are a variety of users which can host their WordPress sites on it. Currently, there are four packages available at their pricing page.

1️⃣ StartUp — Starts at $35 per month.

2️⃣ Growth — Starts at $115 per month.

3️⃣ Scale — Starts at $290 per month.

4️⃣ Custom — Get in touch with a sales specialist of WPEngine for this package.

The following types of users and companies should get their hands on WPEngine’s managed WordPress hosting.

🚴 SMBs — Small and Midsize Businesses

WPEngine’s hosting is great for small and midsize businesses who are looking to move their WordPress website to a more secure, managed, and tension-free environment. These businesses can use WPEngine’s migration, analytics, geotargeting, and scaling to grow their digital experience for their customers.

⚡️ WordPress Agencies

Managed WordPress hosting by WPEngine can be of great use to WP agencies. These agencies can utilize the User Portal of WPEngine to create and launch websites instantly. They can also use it to streamline their workflow of delivering WordPress websites to their customers.

💼 Enterprise Clients

Enterprise clients and large businesses — like National Geographic, AMD, and SoundCloud — are powered by WPEngine. They have a custom plan for such customers which includes dedicated environments, high-performance servers, 24/7 phone, and ticket support backed by an army of WordPress experts, and much more.

🤑 Membership Discount

WPEngine is one of the proud partners of WPCouple. The good folks at WPEngine were kind enough to let us know that the discount code — WPCOUPLE20 — is still in play, which means that you can get 20% off on your first payment.

On the purchase of an annual package, you also get an additional two months worth of hosting for free. Combining that with the above discount code makes it almost four months of premium managed WordPress services without any cost. If I were you, I’d avail this offer to enjoy the peace of mind they’re offering 💃

🙌 Final Words

WPEngine has come a long way since 2010, and they have also managed to make a reputation for their brand in the WordPress community. They have surely achieved this success on the base of the hard work put in by their teams.

The efforts put in by their support and sales team are commendable. They help their customers through their onboarding process and then continue to provide them with excellent support, so a thumbs-up for their service 👍

That being said, should you have any questions regarding the hosting company, or if you have any comments regarding it, then please feel free to leave your comments below ↓

Maedah Batool is a WordPress Core Contributor, Technical Dev Manager and a part-time Journalist. She created a tech-training startup called FinkTanks where she has taught 1,000+ girls how to code with WordPress.